Civil Rights, Bilingual Voting, and Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia in the 1970s

                  Civil Rights, Bilingual Voting and Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia in the 1970s

This essay details the process, result, and impact of the Arroyo v Tucker bilingual election lawsuit in Philadelphia in 1973. While, according to conventional narratives of the Civil Rights Movement, the state of racial protest had moved away from a liberal integrationist vision towards Black Power what we see in this case is a challenge to ascriptive hierarchical ideas about American citizenship from a group whose very language was racialized downwards. Using archival documents and oral history to reconstruct the narrative of the case, we can better understand the motivation of the various players in this case and how they conceptualized ideas of American citizenship. After this litigation, bilingual elections were required by law, but their implementation left something to be desired. This essay explores the short term impact of this litigation on local politics and also comments on the larger impact upon American society. This lawsuit is placed within the context of the “long” Civil Rights Movement and argues that Puerto Ricans were active in the formation of Civil Rights legislation and not merely its beneficiaries. While the “long” movement has been debated by Civil Rights historians, a “broad” interpretive framework allows for the inclusion of other marginalized groups as active participants in the movement.